cloud cover historical data

[Mike Bosilovich]

Hi Claudio,

Just a word of caution. Any reanalysis data is not actually
observations, and each reanalysis has it's own bias and uncertainty,
NCEP or otherwise. One reanalysis is not necessarily representative of
reality, especially in the physics output. Clouds and precipitation
can be much more related to the model part of the data assimilation
system. Temperature and heights less so, until you move toward data
sparse regions.

That said MERRA produces reanalysis cloud fields (1/2 degree
resolution, global). The following links can be opened in gradsdap or
opengrads sessions (sdfopen) to get the MERRA cloud fields:

1 hourly frequency: http://goldsmr2.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov:80/dods/MAT1NXRAD
Monthly: http://goldsmr2.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov:80/dods/MATMNXRAD

The main data page is at:
http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/daac-bin/DataHoldings.pl with a variety
of download options.

Also, you may be interested in installing opengrads on your computer.
It has command lines built in for "merra" and "nomads", and these open
gui interfaces to each reanalyses Grads Data Servers.

Good Luck and have a great weekend!!

Mike

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 11:59 AM, claudio cortes <claudiomet at gmail.com> wrote:
> greetings
>
> when I need historical data for climatological studies, I download
> datasetes from this ftp:
> ftp://ftp.cdc.noaa.gov/pub/Datasets/ncep.reanalysis/pressure/
> where can I find historical values of temperature, geotential heights,
> humidity and wind
> and this information I can extract it using grads
>
> but at this moment, I need cloud cover historial data and
> where can I find cloud cover historical datasets ?
>
> thaks !
>
> --
> Claudio Cortes
> +56 (2) 2994121
>
> Meteorologo
> Laboratorio de Meteorologia y Calidad de Aire
> Centro Nacional del Medio Ambiente (CENMA)
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Claudio Cortes
> +56 (2) 2994121
>
> Meteorologist
> Meteorology and Air Quality Labs
> National Enviroment Center, Chile (CENMA)
>